Technology by RateShield. Coverage placed by Lakeshore Risk Advisors LLC, an independent Illinois brokerage.
For independent agencies

RateShield OS

The operating layer for an independent personal-lines agency. Structured intake, risk-file assembly, document extraction, market selection, and a prioritized work queue, on a multi-tenant and audited foundation.

Built by an operator running it against live personal-lines business in Illinois every day, which is a different thing from software written for a market someone read about.

The premise

An agency runs on a management system, a rater, a dozen carrier portals, a phone, and a spreadsheet reconciling them. None of it interoperates, so a licensed producer spends the majority of a working day as an integration layer: reading documents, retyping fields, and reconstructing context that the business already had.

That work is mechanical, high-volume, and unforgiving of small errors, which makes it the wrong use of the only person in the building who can actually advise a client. RateShield OS absorbs it.

Modules

Behavior is described here. Method is not: how conflicts are resolved and how markets are scored is the part worth keeping.

Intake

Web, dealership hand-off, phone

Structured capture with resumable sessions. Consent is snapshotted verbatim at the point of collection with version, address, and timestamp, so what a client agreed to stays reconstructable years later.

Risk file

Assembly and reconciliation

Attributes are resolved against the subject risk rather than taken on trust. Competing values are retained with provenance instead of overwritten, and disagreements that move price are escalated rather than silently resolved.

Extraction

Declarations and supporting documents

Policy documents are normalized into coverage: limits, deductibles, endorsements, settlement basis. Output is comparable across carriers, which is the part that makes a comparison mean anything.

Market selection

Appetite and packet generation

Eligible markets are ranked for a completed file, and a per-market keying packet is emitted with the values that market asks for, under the names that market uses.

Queue

Daily work, prioritized

One ordered list of what needs a human, with response-time watchdogs and renewal windows. Prioritization runs overnight so the list is already correct at open.

Desk

Calls

Call capture with transcription and structured extraction into the client record. Illinois is all-party consent and the recording announcement gates the recorder rather than following it.

Controls

An agency handing over its book is handing over its clients' personal data and its own regulatory exposure. The foundation is specified rather than asserted.

Tenancy
Every record is scoped to an agency. Scoping is enforced server-side on read and write, not applied as a filter in the interface.
Access
Role-based, with capability checks at the route boundary. Admin, principal, and producer see materially different systems.
Audit
Append-only log of privileged actions with actor, target, and timestamp.
Retention
Scheduled purge of aged personal data on a defined window.
Consent
Versioned. The exact wording shown to a client is stored alongside the record, so a consent claim is answerable with the text they actually saw.
Egress
Outbound data flow is deny-by-default and explicitly allowlisted per destination.
Failure
Destructive steps fail closed with a visible error. A failed archive blocks the action rather than proceeding and losing the record.

Regulatory position

RateShield is a software company. It is not an insurance agency, broker, or carrier, it holds no appointments, and it performs no licensed activity. Quoting, advising, binding, and servicing remain entirely with the licensed agency operating the software and its appointed producers.

The first agency running it is Lakeshore Risk Advisors LLC, an independent Illinois brokerage, which is also where coverage requested through getrateshield.com is placed.

Availability

Early, and deliberately so. Every deployment is configured by hand against how that agency actually works, personal lines first, Illinois first. There is no signup and no price list, because at this stage the fit question is worth answering before either of those would mean anything.

Buying insurance rather than evaluating software? That is over here.